The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America

by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, Timothy J. Nelson Narrated by Janina Edwards

Overview

A sweeping and surprising new understanding of extreme poverty in America from the authors of the acclaimed $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America.

“This book forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” (Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America and Evicted)

Three of the nation's top scholars ­- known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America - turn their attention from the country's poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America's most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there.

This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. Immersing themselves in these communities, pouring over centuries of local history, attending parades and festivals, the authors trace the legacies of the deepest poverty in America-including inequalities shaping people's health, livelihoods, and upward social mobility for families. Wrung dry by powerful forces and corrupt government officials, the “internal colonies” in these regions were exploited for their resources and then left to collapse.

The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common-a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation's places of deepest need.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile

Janina Edwards calmly and clearly presents this data-driven study of U.S. poverty. She does a fine job shifting tone and tempo when the text changes from the authors' words to the words of the subjects they interviewed. Her thoughtful delivery gives this work meaning as she delivers the community profiles, personal stories, and interpretations of data. Her engaging style enables the listener to absorb the hard truths about systemic poverty that this study reveals. The three professors who wrote this audiobook used information from all the counties in the nation and hundreds of cities. They conclude that rural communities actually have greater intractable poverty than cities and that those in places like south Texas, rural Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky are "deeply disadvantaged." A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 06/05/2023

Edin and Shaefer (coauthors, $2 a Day, and, respectively, a sociologist and University of Michigan public policy professor) team up with public affairs scholar Nelson (Doing the Best I Can) to reframe the history of poverty in the U.S. in this essential study. Ranking communities on the basis of income, birth weights, life expectancy, and intergenerational mobility, they find that the country’s most disadvantaged areas are rural ones—Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Tobacco Belt in South Carolina, and south Texas. The authors argue that from the 18th through the 20th centuries these regions were intentionally treated by government policy as “internal colonies.” With economies based on resource extraction (coal, timber, cotton, etc.) and usually populated by majority people of color, these were places where labor was systematically exploited, elites controlled both local and state governments, and public services were meager. According to the authors, these regions “still retain, to a greater or lesser degree, features of the internal colonies they once were,” because of inherited problems such as local government corruption, lack of social infrastructure, and structural racism. This eye-opening account provides a powerful lens with which to view contemporary inequality in America. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

"A powerful, alarming portrayal of how poverty remains entrenched in unfairly forgotten places across America." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Three of the nation’s top poverty scholars deliver a profound inquiry into the most disadvantaged communities in America. Combining historical and statistical analysis with on-the-ground interviewing, the authors present novel and provocative arguments for many social ills that plague these regions. This book challenges and enrages, humbles and indicts—and forces you to see American poverty in a whole new light.” — Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted and Poverty, by America

“This eye-opening account provides a powerful lens with which to view contemporary inequality in America." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Every few years, an academic work arrives that transcends genre, combining unparalleled research skills with engaging storytelling. The Injustice of Place… harnesses the most powerful aspects of big data while diving into historic narratives that continue to inform and instruct.”  — Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"An innovative study of American poverty." — Booklist

“Eye-opening… One of the most thoroughly researched portraits to date of poverty in often forgotten and neglected areas of the United States.” — Library Journal

“Captivating and insightful, The Injustice of Place sheds new light on how the places in which we live shape so many aspects of our lives — from our jobs to our health to our children's prospects. By interweaving big data with on-the-ground ethnography and historical analysis, the authors exemplify the best of social science today, and will surely help frame policy discussions in the years to come.” — Raj Chetty, Harvard University, recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal recognizing the economist under forty whose work has made the most significant contribution to the field

“Woven with vivid, first-hand accounts and bolstered by fresh data, Injustice of Place convincingly knots present-day disadvantage to the long tail of racism and extractive capitalism. This book delivers new insights into solving today’s most intractable injustices.” — Mona Hanna-Attisha, Flint, MI, pediatrician and author of What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City

“There is no book on poverty in America quite like this one. Original reporting and rigorous data analysis reveal a living history of injustice maintained through corruption, resource extraction, and violence; but the book doesn’t leave us there. We meet everyday people who, even in the face of backlash from the economic and political elite, try to bring about change. Incisive, surprising, enraging, and hopeful, The Injustice of Place is the book on poverty we’ve needed all along.” — Reuben Jonathan Miller, 2022 MacArthur Fellow and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration 

Library Journal

08/04/2023

In this well-researched title, authors Edin, H. Luke Shaefer, and Timothy J. Nelson, all top experts on the subject of poverty, find that the most economically disadvantaged populations in the U.S. are in the areas of Appalachia, the Hispanic districts in South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt. Of the 100 most impoverished places in the country, only 12 are cities, while the majority are rural. This book indicates that the poorest communities all suffer from separate and highly unequal schooling and crumbling physical and social infrastructures. Further exasperating this situation is a wide swath of entrenched political corruption in these places, which has prevented any remedial legislation from being enacted, and a backlash, sometimes violent, against basic civil rights. Revolts against these conditions began in the early years of the Great Depression. The battle continued and finally inspired Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, a set of programs designed to help impoverished Americans. Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson offer an eye-opening view of the deeply entrenched status of poverty today. VERDICT One of the most thoroughly researched portraits to date of poverty in often forgotten and neglected areas of the United States. Purchase for behavioral and social science collections.—Claude Ury

AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile

Janina Edwards calmly and clearly presents this data-driven study of U.S. poverty. She does a fine job shifting tone and tempo when the text changes from the authors' words to the words of the subjects they interviewed. Her thoughtful delivery gives this work meaning as she delivers the community profiles, personal stories, and interpretations of data. Her engaging style enables the listener to absorb the hard truths about systemic poverty that this study reveals. The three professors who wrote this audiobook used information from all the counties in the nation and hundreds of cities. They conclude that rural communities actually have greater intractable poverty than cities and that those in places like south Texas, rural Alabama, South Carolina, and Kentucky are "deeply disadvantaged." A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2023-05-01
Disturbing analysis of the persistent, surprising connection between poverty and place.

Edin, Shaefer, and Nelson developed this ambitious, revealing project in a roundabout way, following a prior collaboration examining family-centered poverty (Edin and Shaefer’s $2.00 a Day): “We wondered: Why were so few of our colleagues studying whole communities? Why weren’t we?” In 2019, they started embedding researchers to conduct immersive interviews in “Appalachia, South Texas, and the vast southern Cotton Belt running across seven states.” The isolation of the pandemic also turned the authors toward historical research, and a post-pandemic, 14-state “road trip” to see these places underscored the complexity encoded in unraveling narratives of “place-based disadvantage.” The problem persists, they argue, because of long-term, secretive webs of corporate control, rooted in sudden innovations in resource extraction that immediately require exploitation of mass human labor. “In place after place,” they write, “we discovered astonishing stories about the industries that fueled the rise of our nation, the workers who sustained them, and the histories of human suffering they wrought.” Unsurprisingly, “while some of these were majority-white, many, indeed most, were rural communities of color.” The authors vividly establish narrative and place by organizing the discussion into key subtopics, including the persistence of violence and political corruption. Despite this bleak focus on the human consequences in lived environments, they muster some optimism, talking to activist residents and offering suggestions, including an end to separate but unequal schooling and a recommitment to addressing violence and isolation via social mobility and restoration of public spaces. The collaborative writing is polished and clear, blending dynamic narrative detail and well-organized argument along with the plaintive voices of interviewees. “Great wealth was extracted from these regions in the form of raw materials that fueled not only national but global markets,” write the authors. “Yet from the start, these were also the places in the nation with the most inequality, severe poverty, ill health, and limited mobility.”

A powerful, alarming portrayal of how poverty remains entrenched in unfairly forgotten places across America.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176519433
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	08/08/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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